Clueless n00bs

I am quite upset. I have been having an ongoing and intermittent issue with steam/sound card/drivers/vista (not sure who is at fault). My voice cuts in and out rapidly. it sounds like somebody is rapidly enabling and disabling mute on me. This is both in steam, and in games, all games. CS:S, Left 4 Dead, etc.

Sometimes. Not always though. that is what is infuriating. I can’t seem to isolate the issue either. Sometimes a reboot clears it, sometimes monkeying with settings in the control panel fixes it, sometimes restarting steam fixes it, sometimes a blood sacrifice fixes it. Hell sometimes I can’t clear it, like today, and I have L4D blue balls.

I am inclined to believe that the problem lies with my ancient Sound Blaster Audigy or its drivers. I have updated the driver and that seemed to correct the issue for a while, but its back now and it won’t go away. I have a feeling that this is an issue using old hardware with reluctantly programmed drivers. I’m gonna pull it and run off of on board sound to see if I can get this shit sorted out. Maybe I won’t even notice the sound quality difference.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Gaming, Hardware, PC, Steaming Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.